Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty Haiku is an open source OS with a few differences. The big one is that even though it has some Unix-like cornerstones, it isn't an orthodox Unix experience. The next is that it's pretty close to being a realistic, usable alternative OS for ordinary, everyday use. The Haiku Project has released a new beta version of its …
I saw the BeOS demo too. I recall that it was heavily dependent on the Metrowerks CodeWarrior development environment, which was my favorite IDE at the time. Metrowerks started releasing inoperative updates and that was pretty much the end of the BeOS demos. I never saw one again.
This was about the same time that MacOS and Windows were highly unstable, both in APIs and reliability. I ended up switching from C++ to Java for primary development.
"...I will try to keep introducing new weird and wonderful stuff..."
Speaking of which, one of the most weird (and, from all accounts, wonderful) OSs I've encountered in the literature is a real beauty named KolibriOS.
It supposedly has already booted as one glances away; it's that fast.
It's written entirely in assembly language; it runs with as little as 8 MB of RAM. It's an offshoot of the MenuetOS effort.
For one account, check this out;
as well as the official website, here.
[Author here]
> a real beauty named KolibriOS
I have had a very brief look at KolibriOS, MenuetOS and VisOpSys.
They are all mightily impressive achievements, but I feel that they are self-limiting. Not that many people can write pure assembly language these days, and not that many want to. Maintaining a large project in it, and coordinating multiple developers, is a bit of a masochistic project. I don't think they're going to get a lot of volunteers.
I'm hugely impressed by how far they have got, but still...
Too much of it may be lost in the mists of time, but I'd love one on Atheos, especially the early years. It seemed like one man wrote a graphical OS and underlying FS (based around BeFS IIRC) that was a bit like Amega OS, but not quite, then just gave up one year.
It then got forked, but has since floundered.
(Actually, my memory suggests the fork might be why it got abandoned, but again, it's years ago now).
[Author here]
> Atheos, especially the early years
Kurt Skauen, a Norwegian developer. He is still around, working in videogames these days.
http://kavionic.com/blog/kavionic/
It was an amazing achievement, but I think he did what he wanted to do and moved on.
Syllable OS was the project that tried to pick it up and move on, but that's even harder for something of this size and complexity.
I ran it in VirtualPC, I think, and it was amazingly impressive.
But getting from there to something of general applicability is an even bigger effort. You need tonnes of drivers and apps and testing and vast amounts of error checking, logging, reporting, and so on.
I feel that at this point, with the huge breadth of capabilities of modern OSes, the way forward is really radical simplicity.
It's basically impossible to compete with Linux by taking it head-on as a general purpose OS.
But there are tiny OSes out there that do amazing stuff that conventional 1970s-style Unix can't even approach. Inferno is one example.
As I wrote in my piece about Optane, I would like to see someone confront PMEM -- persistent memory -- and tackle it the hard way. It is doable, today, to build a computer with, say, 16GB of normal volatile RAM and the rest of the memory map filled with say 1TB of nonvolatile RAM. Directly-accessible storage on the memory bus, no indirection, no blocks to fetch and write: just memory, but memory that keeps its contents when you turn the computer off.
Let's see an OS that uses that as its basic abstraction. No disks, no files, no filesystem, no directories: it's all just RAM, but 99.99% of your RAM is nonvolatile. Throw away everything since the invention of hard disks and start afresh.
Throw away C and compilers at the same time. They are legacy tech. They take an input file in one format, translate it into another format, and write that into a new file. It's all just RAM. You JIT compile something then leave it there in RAM for the next 10 years.
The first time you boot, the OS is loaded into memory over the network, then it just stays there. Updates mean just loading new code.
You can reboot if you need, no problem. Zero a few counters, start running again from address zero.
We don't need the entire filesystem model any more. That's 20th century legacy tech. Throw it away.
Lisp is too hard, but Lisp Machines and Smalltalk boxes showed some of the way: the entire live runtime environment is the workspace.
Some Forths had an elegant model: enter code at the REPL, it's interpreted. Put it in a function definition, give it a name, and it's compiled and kept. That could still fly.
Maybe a friendlier wrapper around Lisp, like Apple's Dylan. That's still out there.
There's a lot of stuff that nobody is trying. Rewriting a 1980s design on 202Xs hardware is not the way forward.
Yes, thank-you for these articles about OSs. By the way, did you se that the 1000-th edition of Distro-Watch featured that MX-Linux was their favorite distro ?
As a remark, you didn't talk in details in this article about the Haiku kernel : is it monolithic, did they re-write the BeOS kernel (how ????), what's the difference from the Linux or FreeBSD or Minix kernel ...
And while we're at it : did you ever try Minix ? I'd be very interested to read a real-world test about it.
If you do decide to run it, perhaps you might expand on the very good article which you wrote last August:
"MX Linux 21.2: Middleweight Debian-based distro is well worth a look
We took our first official test drive and became a little infatuated"
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/31/mx_linux_212/
[Author here]
> the very good article which you wrote last August
I am glad you liked it, and thank you for the kind words!
I have a test install on one of my newest machines, and yesterday I updated it to v21.3. Works a treat. I do need a lot more free time for a long-term test, though...
What would make that OS stand out would be adding an implementation of overlay encrypted system profiles.
This means that you would be able to log in to a different environment for the same user depending on the password.
It would be impossible to prove the user has multiple overlay accounts on the system due to encryption.
This would be a game changer for security and privacy.
For additional security you could program an AI to actively use one of overlay profiles after training of your daily routine. For instance, visit some news sites, play some music, read emails etc.
So when adversary forces you to log in to your computer you could log in to one of overlays and they won't be able to tell it is real or not and it will have all recent activity.
[Author here]
> log in to a different environment for the same user
Well, as there is no log in mechanism currently, that could be tricky!
It's like the good old days of OS/2 2, or RISC OS, or AmigaOS, or ST TOS, or various other late-1980s and early-1990s OSes I used. You turn it on, it boots, you're in.
No name, no password, no serial number, no badge, nothing.
Fun story:
I was at the launch of MS Office 97, waaaaaaay back. It was launched at an amazing private "magic house" in Kennington in South London, near where I lived.
MS demoed it on Windows 95. Some machines got rebooted. This caused great consternation, because it displayed a login screen and nobody knew the credentials.
I only heard about this later -- to be honest, I was probably in the bar. Apparently a lot of UK IT luminaries were baffled. Many of the hardcore types had already switched to NT 4 by then, a proper OS with login security. They'd forgotten, if they ever knew, that Win95 didn't have any. If you didn't know the password, or username, or both, you just...
Pressed Escape.
And off it went, full 100% access to everything. It only passed any credentials you gave it to network servers. Windows 9x itself literally had no use for them. It ran on FAT and had no way to check, apply, or store user permissions, because FAT doesn't do that. You are always the admin because there is nobody else.
Well, Haiku is the same.
At least for now. They could have got some of this under the hood, but I have not heard of it.
I did not go into great technical depth on any of the clever stuff in Haiku, partly for lack of room. There's plenty. I hope that I will come back to this when I write about Haiku 1.0.
> It's like the good old days of OS/2 2, or RISC OS, or AmigaOS, or ST TOS, or various other late-1980s and early-1990s OSes I used. You turn it on, it boots, you're in.
TOS… Sigh. I loved it for its simplicity and I loved the machines for the possibility to control everything. Sigh.
Reminded me about a lecture on where we might have gone wrong since then:
The Thirty Million Line Problem (1:48:54)
I don't know if there was any explicit links between the Amiga and BeOS, but in the late 90's, when Commodore was busy hammering the last nails into it's own coffin, and Amiga users were realising that we'd have to jump ship, BeOS was looking like the most Amiga-like choice.
Of course, it turned out to be very Amiga-like, as it crashed and burned well before achieving it's potential.
[Author here]
> any explicit links between the Amiga and BeOS
Directly, technically, not that I know of, no.
However, one of the stated ambitions for Be in the early days was to be the New Amiga. A very powerful multimedia workhorse, with an innovative, legacy-free OS, with very rich multitasking, and open to hardware and software hackers. That's why the BeBox included a "GeekPort" for expansion hardware, alongside ISA and PCI slots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox#I/O_Board
There were intentions to take the good ideas from the Amiga but remove the limitations:
• Amiga OS was assembled from discrete parts written in different languages. BeOS was all in one, (then) modern language.
• AmigaOS had great multitasking, but no memory protection and adding that would break compatibility. BeOS was deeply multithreaded and SMP enabled from the first version.
• the Amiga had no native networking; BeOS did very early on.
• And it learned from the ST too: build-in MIDI ports as standard.
I installed it in a VM, it runs nicely
Won't run in Parallels Pro on my Mac :-(
The 4th icon on the startup screen lights up then it just sits there.. I've tried all sorts of tweaks (kept the HD and CD both configured as IDE - Parallels won't let you configure the CD drive as SCSI otherwise I'd do both as SCSI).
Gave up in the end.
It runs really well on even the oldest eeePCs (I have a 701 4G Surf) even though they don't technically meet the minimum resolution requirements - even the wifi works! It's even better now I've managed to "right" clock the eee to its native 900 MHz too.
Many "x32" builds wont work on the elderly chips in the eeepc series. The 486-grade chips in these things are missing some modern instructions. Certainly today's Debian won't play.
Kids had 701s when they were small. My maxed-out one gathers dust due to the lack of a recent OS.
"Many "x32" builds wont work on the elderly chips in the eeepc series. The 486-grade chips in these things are missing some modern instructions...Kids had 701s when they were small. My maxed-out one gathers dust due to the lack of a recent OS."
You are most certainly, absolutely, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt correct. They are totally worthless.
IF YOU'RE GOING TO THROW YOURS AWAY, THROW IT THIS WAY. Seriously. Deadly-serious-ly.
I was a big fan back in the day. A small light OS without all the legacy crap that came with every other OS. What's not to like? But the stumbling block was the lack of application support. Way back then any FOSS OS was pretty poor when it cam to app support, but they have got better. It seems that Haiku hasn't.
WINE sounds good to people who have never used it, but the problem is that it's never 100%. If WINE were 100% then it would still make sense to run Windows applications on Haiku for the simple reason that even with WINE Haiku should still be smaller and lighter than Windows. But because WINE isn't really 100% what you're left with is an OS that will really only let you use basic apps and the web. That's not necessarily the death knell some might think. There are a lot of people who really only use their laptop or PC for that no matter what OS and applications they have installed they are essentially using their device as a www workstation. However there's always Chromium OS if you want to do that (or even ChromeOS if you must).
If some apps can be ported to Haiku then it may go somewhere, but without that I suspect that Haiku may sink almost without trace as BeOS did before it. I really, really hope it doesn't however.
With Google behind a significant proportion of the dev of Haiku; they may well be thinking of a "more potent" competitor to Chrome for different types of devices.
Haiku as a front end for day to day office uses? Yes please.
There's a gaping corner in the market for a wedge "bedroom computer" that just works, isn't too expensive, and runs games. Build it and we will come!
"Haiku as a front end for day to day office uses? "
You're crazy. Although the author and posters here so far have put BeOS in a positive light, I'm going to say it was trash.
I used it on several devices in the late 1990's including a OEM BeBox, a WinCE tablet (ran as a VM) and even on a Sega Dreamcast for a media player for about a year (until XBMP came along) . Ironically, the official BeBox was by far the worst experience as you couldn't write anything typical on it due to it's quirky support for PPC. I still remember staring at a hello world wonder why on Earth it won't compile although on OS8 it would just fine. It's no wonder nobody Ported anything to it... they couldn't!! The GUI was about as great as the article describes... which is not great at all unless you love pop-ups (nobody does, it's why they died). The tablet I ran it on was the best experience I ever had with BeOS because I could write a touch driver for WinCE and it would work fine in BeOS... that should tell you something about writing for BeOS.
"There's a gaping corner in the market for a wedge "bedroom computer" that just works, isn't too expensive, and runs games. Build it and we will come!"
I doubt that. This isn't the 1990s anymore. Cheap laptops and tablets are everywhere, and they meet a lot of those requirements. A cool OS like Haiku appears to be doesn't sell as many things as yet another iPad does, and there's basically no chance they'll get as cheap as landfill Android tablets which are surprisingly common. Mobile games are quite popular and the app stores are full of them. If you want something that's better at being a computer, cheap laptops are out there and run pretty well, with the original Windows or the OS of your choice for the more technically aware users.
I don't think there's that much of a gap in the market. Any new computer will have to compete against a laptop, tablet, or both, and I don't see how Haiku, even if it's UI is as great as everyone here says it is (I never used BeOS) will take over.
App support for Haiku has got a lot better.
Every app I have used so far today is available apart from Firefox (and there are a number of decent web browsers for Haiku), Zim (for which there is probably a decent substitute), and KDE Connect.
It seems it has everything else I need (even QEMU, which I did not expect) including a lot of command line tools (ssh, rsync, ) so I probably could use it as daily driver if everything works reliably.
[Author here]
> It seems that Haiku hasn't.
This is not the case, as I spelled out in the article.
Haiku has a pretty good app catalogue and there are lots of Linux ports, as well as a few BSD ports too.
And there's WINE and DOSbox so you can run Windows and DOS apps, too.
I think already, before version 1.0, Haiku has 100x more apps than BeOS ever did.
Does it connect to fileshares or did you not get that far in your testing? NFS ideally but SMB/CIFS will do. I've got an old EeePC[*] begging for something like this. I've looked at Haiku on and off over the years and been impressed by the progress so something that sounds like it's small, fast and finally "capable" would be a godsend for older kit, especially if the onboard wireless might be supported :-)
* Currently dual booting Win7 and LinuxMint, both of which struggle a bit, but only really used for "Lounge" browsing while watching TV, eg IMDB look-ups :-)
What's not to like?
Well, for me, personally, it's 1) the lack of security, and more importantly 2) it's Yet Another WIMP UI. I really can't be bothered experimenting with another OS that gives me another serving of that unappetizing dish.
Enjoyed the article, though, and I think it's a pity Be did not succeed, even if their products didn't interest me personally.
Back in the day it had no support, at all, for multiuser or file-based permissions or anything like that. Has that changed? How would you do any modern anti-malware protection with that kind of security model?
It ran great on my dual-PII. It was so cool to see both processor bars light up at the same time.
[Author here]
> Will this present an insurmountable problem down the line
It's impossible to say right now.
Haiku does understand and can apply Unix file ownership and permissions. But currently, you're always root and as such it ignores them.
The BeFS is extraordinarily rich and can do a lot of stuff no other FS can, although several of its developers ended up at Apple and have re-implemented some of the fun stuff there.
I think what Haiku *might* end up with is a model a bit like a standalone Windows Vista box: for most people, there's one user account, and you normally use that, and it has restricted permissions. There's a (maybe semi-hidden) root account, and when you need to do something, you have to say "yes I mean it", every time.
But this is idle speculation. I do not know what they plan to do in future versions.
I've been watching this with interest since I first heard about it. Looks like I'll have to find time to give it a spin. I've an eeePC901 hanging around as well as an old dual core Athon machine. I'm also hoping it can be ported to the Raspberry Pi - that would make a dramatic improvement!
An 1990 operating system which features multi-threading, pre-emptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing, a monolithic (hybrid) microkernel...and whose size, today--right now--is less than 1200 megabytes? Give me a break!!
--------------------------------------------------
From Linux Magazine:
"Haiku Close Up"
Article from Issue 216/2018
Author(s): Alexander Tolstoy
"...Haiku has relatively modest hardware requirements. It needs an x86-compatible CPU (Pentium II or above), 128MB of RAM (1GB is recommended), and at least 700MB of hard drive space. Our aging Sandy Bridge-based machine felt like a super-speed jet with Haiku...The Haiku desktop boots in just a fraction of time compared with an average systemd-based Linux system (which is not slow at all, by the way)...Although Haiku is a relatively small project, it stands on the shoulders of BeOS, a perfectly designed, well-tested, and polished operating system, which is why Haiku feels like a finished product. Haiku is perhaps the only non-mainstream OS that offers unexperienced users such a great variety of available software..."
-----------------------------------------------------------
From DistroWatch
3 Aug 2020, review of r1 beta2
"...Haiku is approximately on par in terms of user friendliness with such mainstream Linux distributions as Linux Mint or Pop!_OS, while being a fraction of their size...Haiku is rare in that it worked with all of my laptop's hardware. This meant I could fire up the laptop and be on-line in under 30 seconds from the power button being pressed to the time I was checking my preferred news sites. Not many operating systems can balance that kind of efficiency with this level of hardware support and my hat is off to the Haiku team... Haiku can be used almost exclusively to accomplish my work on a day-to-day basis on my laptop now and I am impressed with what this light, responsive, desktop-oriented project has accomplished in recent years..."
-------------------------------------------------------
from OSnews
"A Programmer’s Introduction to the Haiku OS"
Guest post by Andrew Hudson 2011-07-14
"...An exceptional feature of Haiku that sets it apart from other operating systems is the fact that every window has, by default, two separate threads. One thread for graphic updates, and a second thread for user interaction. One thread runs inside the application server, and the other inside the application. This allows visual updates to occur completely separately from IO. This is a major contributing factor to the overall responsiveness of Haiku. It also means that every Haiku application with a window is both multithreaded, and supports multiprocessing by default. More threads can be spawned as needed, and Haiku natively supports the POSIX threads interface. This solves the common problem of applications becoming unresponsive during disk, CD, or network activities..."
-----------------------------------------------------------
I have found the operating system I've been looking for. And no, I do not need a multi-user OS. I have, and use a PC, a personal computer.
[Author here]
> Best laptop ever.
:-) It's a bit of a chunky beast, to be fair.
It's a lovely machine with a great keyboard, but it's getting a bit sluggish. I've tried openSUSE, Ubuntu and Windows 7 on mine, and all were... not super quick.
For portability and toughness, I favour my X200, TBH. Widely held to be The Best Laptop Ever Made, as I have mentioned in the past:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/thinkpad_motherboard_mod/
I reviewed Alpine on my W500:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/26/alpine_linux_316_released/
It is still there, updates smoothly. Alpine uses 3 primary partitions, which leaves little room for anything else. Haiku needs a primary partition, I believe. So, I left Alpine's boot partition, but copied `/` and `swap` into logical partitions with SystemRescue and GParted. I deleted the originals. It booted without a hiccup as it locates partitions by GUID not by device name or number. I updated it then installed Haiku.
Alpine uses `syslinux` instead of GRUB, and it could not detect the new OS. So, I removed syslinux, installed GRUB, wrote it to the boot sector, added a Haiku stanza to a GRUB config file, and now it dual-boots smoothly. All the steps are documented on the Alpine and Haiku sites. Alpine can't mount the Haiku partition, but Haiku can mount Alpine's partitions.
It all went impressively smoothly. When time permits I will try Haiku on some newer hardware as well, but my to-do list is lengthy and not getting any shorter...
I also have a W520, which is a similar size and shape, quite substantially faster, can support an mSATA SSD in its mini-PCI slot, and the quad-core model of which has 4 SO-DIMM slots, meaning mine has 16GB of RAM which cost about £5, and it can take 32GB. The only downside is that it needs a special power brick. For me, the W520 is better: much more capable and quite a powerhouse even after a decade. It's about as portable as a breeze-block, though.
BeOS could do this 27 years ago, always blows my mind, on a dual core pentium 2 @ 266MHz (They even disable one CPU core) with 64 MiB of RAM, a 3GiB HDD and two hauppauge video capture cards: https://youtu.be/BsVydyC8ZGQ?t=840
Thank you for the link. I recall the demo very well. Had BeOS on one machine for a while and loved it. Sadly at the time software availability (whether free or paid for) was just too limiting. They definitely had multimedia handling done right and nothing like the battles with Windows and Hauppauge cards.
I will have to give it another whirl now.
[Author here]
Yes, I'm a Psion fan too.
In case you missed it, I wrote about a new Psion add-on recently:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/03/sidecar_getting_psions_online/
Andrew Orlowski did perhaps the definitive history of Psion here some years ago:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2007/06/26/psion_special/
The 3 was just right for pocketability. The keyboard on 5 was fantastic and screen was nicer too. Many colleagues went for Palm Pilots but I preferred the Psions. Should still have Psions in boxes somewhere. may have to hunt, although i seem to recall display cable issue on some.
OPL was great for passing time, especially on airports and planes and trains. Later i used pretty much just Nokia Communicator instead of 3/5.
> Many colleagues went for Palm Pilots but I preferred the Psions.
A favourite little trick of mine down the pub was, when a friend started scribbling my contact details into their Palm or Visor, I'd beam my contact card to them over IRDA from my Psion 5.
Their "scribble thing" went >BING< and then all my details were just... _there_.
It generally blew their minds; they had no idea the gadgets could do that.
I still miss my old Nokia Communicator, and regret selling "The Brick"... it was sooo useful, even had a dialup modem. The Cosmo Communicator is wildly annoying in lots of little ways in terms of hardware design, plus constant bugginess, which doesn't get deloused.
A shrunk Sony VAIO P would suit me even better - I completely fail to understand why manufacturers don't see the market for something like that. I'd be happy with a new product of Psion 3's dimensions and weight, soprting the same puny Atom CPU the VAIO P contains, capable of running Windows XP or 7.
[Author here]
> A shrunk Sony VAIO P would suit me even better
I agree with you, but I have to observe that there are several tiny PCs out there that approach this.
Here is one example:
https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket
And the later, higher-spec model:
https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3
What puts me off them is the keyboards, TBH. I know a few people who have them and love the things.
> https://gpd.hk/gpdpocket3
When I saw those I was quite amped, because it'd be nice to have a new and more powerful ultra-luggable device... but they're too darned wide! I mean, it's called the "Pocket", but I don't have any pockets which would accommodate that! Or are pockets larger in China? The Sony VAIO P is narrower and just about fits into a few of my coats, I'd prefer if one could carried about in a shirt pocket. I'm about to ask a tailor to make an old leather jacket inner pocket larger, for my VAIO P lol - fashioning a pocket wide enough for the GPD Pocket would be impractical methinks. There were some smaller XP ultraportables of the same or slightly earlier era, which sometimes pop up on fleabay with issues, often the batteries are made using unobtainium or they're in some other language, or are too low performance to be of any use. Plus old stuff breaks easy. Although a bit too big, I haven't seen Sony's Transmeta Crusoe poweredultrabooks appear, but there's the occasional OQO - OQONONO! High purity unobtanium battries required! Besides, I'd never get the band back together and it'd do a lot of screeching.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68&t=15s
https://regmedia.co.uk/2008/12/24/c1vn_1.jpg
> What puts me off them is the keyboards, TBH.
I agree - icky horrible rubber keys! Very Sinclair. The symbols will rub off in no time, probably - paint doesn't fare well with stretching, rubber wears down, or at least my ebike tyres do.
Until some manufacturers sees sense and produces icle energy-sipping laptops which fit into normal pockets at a reasonable price, I'm holding that purchasing money hostage. For now, I'm stuck with the VAIO P a bit longer. Must swap out that HDD for a 1.8" SSD, after I source a thin and small adapter which will fit... then backup an .ISO of the old drive (facilitated by another adapter) and then go nuts trying different OSs and multiboots - Haiku is first on the list! Hope you do it first ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdZ9weP5i68&t=15s
"It doesn't have Windows 95-style two-pane Explorer windows, with the folder tree in the left pane and the contents of the currently selected one in the right pane. Even though most Linux desktops have that now, it's a Windowsism that wasn't invented until after BeOS came out. "
Norton Commander and similar utilities had that under DOS long before Microsoft adopted the idea. I had a friend who wrote such a file manager for DOS before Windows had it (while Windows was still a failure at version 1). This would have been before 1989.
[Author here]
> Norton Commander and similar utilities had that under DOS long before Microsoft adopted the idea.
I think you slightly got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
I was not claiming this was _new_ to Win95. What I am saying is that almost every other desktop, even GNOME, uses the Win95 style of file manager window now.
This specific 2-pane design, tree on the left and contents on the right, I think was new in Windows 3.1. Compare the Windows 3.0 and Windows 3.1 File Manager screenshots here:
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/filemanager
Windows 3.0 had the tree in its own window, and that is what OS/2 ≥2's Workplace Shell inherited as well, as you can see on the same page.
Secondly, it's important not to confuse the basic two-pane design with the specific implementation where the left pane functions only to allow you to navigate what is shown in the right pane. They work as an inseparable pair. The classic Win3.1 mode of operation for many people was to have two of these subwindows open, typically side by side, for a total of 4 panes. Some found that confusing, though, which is I suspect why MS added "cut", "copy" and "paste" commands.
The more generic 2-pane file manager, with independent navigation in each and the pair act as source and destination, is a design now known as an Orthodox File Manager:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Orthodox_file_managers
The first two-pane file manager is contentious, but yes, Norton Commander was up there:
https://fman.io/blog/dual-pane-file-manager-history/
However PathMinder was at least a year older:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PathMinder
Typing this using the WebPositive Web browser on Haiku using a 32bit USB live image. Core duo /3Gb ram
Snappy and fun. Someone has been having a laugh with the comments against some of the items in top in the terminal.
(No Vi, not even ed, you get Nano 6.x though).
Wishing the project well. Needs an office package (other than Caligra).
Is reminiscent of Mac 9 and similar.
My memory of BeOS is selecting a bunch of MP3 files and choosing to open them, and having it play them all *simultaneously* instead of queuing them. Which did a good job showing off the then-unusual software mixer capability, but also sort of followed the OS's pattern of doing whatever would seem cool to geeks instead of what a normal user would expect. ;)
Have you tried Haiku on your Sony VAIO P? I might install it on mine, after swapping out the HD for a SSD... which I'm ashamed to say, I still haven't located a Round Tuit to enable such yet. I'm still umming and ahhing about whether an SSD will fit with a converter, and which converter? I may have to try a few. If it plays music and movies better than Windows 7, is capable of editing field recordings, can connect an external USB soundcard, runs a basic DAW, surfs the web and some version of "Office" variant can be ported, it'll be a keeper for that device as a multiboot option, at the very least. But I'm not holding out much hope because of the VAIO P's puny graphics hardware, which fails to even play Youtube videos without stuttering (I believe this an Intel driver writing issue, their being negligent)(Youtube audio plaback is ok).
KolibriOS on VAIO P perhaps? Small and light might work out better for it's weakling Atom CPU. I don't want to overclock, passive cooling wouldn't keep up. Looks very interesting, I might have a go.
VAIP P battery: I have the original, which is on it’s last legs so I bought a new high capacity “New old stock” version on fleabay. That yields very good battery life indeed, but does so bulkily… so I tried to source another new battery in the slim form factor of the original… but got sent a mislabelled apparently unused new and incompatible version… for which I got a complete refund. I then started wondering if I could simply swap over the lithium-ion gel packs the original and the incompatible batteries contain. Quite likely sadly not, because of Sony’s battery health chip on the BMS, which has to be reset using two different cables and software. Also cutting the wires in the right sequence is critical: positive first or it turns into a scene from Die Hard (1 or n, unsure which or how many there were/are) or something.
I very much enjoy reading your OS articles, and those about somewhat obscure hardware and software, sometimes of yesteryear.
The Sony Vaio was/is a beautiful machine; I still lust after one.
If you're serious about upgrading it, I would be really surprised if MX-Linux 18.1 Continuum didn't do the trick, and in an elegant fashion (see this.). The later versions of MX have gotten slightly more bloated, but may still work fine. Certainly the latest version of antiX (NOT Artix), the spiritual cousin of MX Linux, would be an outstanding substitute.
Mine cost me £68 on Gumtree several years ago - the seller texted me an address to meet up, then directed me to an alleyway adjoining the address he had texted... didn't even live there... and the BIOS had a (for setup) password, which had to be cleared later using a code obtained from a seller with a decoder on fleabay. Seller was one of those phone repair guys, the VAIO was used to update phones, he never looked at the BIOS, and hadn't set screen aspect ratio properly... so I haggled him down lol. After we'd done the deal, the lady who actually lived at the property challenged me, asking me what on earth I was doing in her alleyway, so I explained, and asked if she knew who the seller was - she did, vaguely. I suspect he feared buyers seeking refunds? Love my VAIO... I use it most days on the go. Nothing new is small enough...
[Author here]
Thanks very much for the kind words!
> Have you tried Haiku on your Sony VAIO P?
Ha! Actually, that is high on my list to try.
It runs the RasPi Desktop reasonably, but it's sluggish.
Oddly, I recently installed Windows XP on it, of all things, and it's quite responsive with that!
>Thanks very much for the kind words!
Your articles are highlights of The Reg
>> Have you tried Haiku on your Sony VAIO P?
>Ha! Actually, that is high on my list to try.
Could you let us know how that goes? I for one, will read with much interest.
> Oddly, I recently installed Windows XP on it, of all things, and it's quite responsive with that!
Ah good old XP can make any old turd shine! I'm sure that flies compared to Win 7. It's good to hear yours is in use too. I was going to do the same, but didn't want to lose some function or other, can't recall which lacked XP drivers - audio gear is much easier to get working on XP than on Win 7 - I have two Core2Quad 9400 machines (exact hardware and software clones) still making themselves musically useful, and I use them every day. And I have spare motherboards for those mothballed, because they're so useful. However, I find quite a lot of websites will no longer load on any browsers available for XP (I only surf firewalled and port blocked to hell). Once I get a few 1/8" SSDs and solve the converter installtion problem (fitting it into the available space), I'll try various OSs on the VAIO and see what I can install to do useful work on the road. I'm glad I archived all the available drivers before pesky Sony removed them from their website.
In the early days of my computing higher learning one of the tasks for the class was to create a bootable USB with an operating system of the students choice and install it to what was, let's be honest, a piece of scrap metal, documenting the steps while doing so then performing some basic configuration once running.
While everyone else was installing XP (and maybe the odd Ubuntu) my OS of choice was Haiku. This was 2010-ish so must have been early Alpha stages, but it did everything I needed it to do to pass that module.
Glad to see it's still progressing and doing well, I may spin it up again and see what's changed.
I wonder how Macrohard™ (their software aint small, and they're hard [of course, jokes are funnier when explained]) will kill Haiku? Presumably harder to kill, because of Google's involvement? I can't imagine Nadella liking this at all. But they make so much more money selling cloud - if Wins 10 and 11 are anything to go by, they clearly don't care about the desktop anymore. Never 10! And 11! 7 forever! (even if I have to virtualise 7 in Linux for decades)
